You See Halloween as Scary

You’re a friendly person, but not the life of the party. You like making someone else’s day – and you’ll dress up if you think of a really fun costume. (Ok, so far, so good. this really does sound like me. I haven’t dressed up in some time, but plan to again in the future. I am a friendly person, but really, really don’t want to be the life of a party, and actually prefer small gatherings to large parties.)

No one quite understands you, but everyone also sort of worships you. And that’s exactly how you like it. (Nope, none of this. )

Your inner child is open minded, playful, and adventurous. (My inner child does enjoy watching the granddaughters dress up and enjoy Halloween, but am mostly a traditional person.)

You truly fear the dark side of humanity. You are a true misanthrope.You’re prone to be quite emotional and over dramatic. Deep down, you enjoy being scared out of your mind… even if you don’t admit it. (This does not fit me. I do not enjoy being scared ‘out of my mind,’ and am not a ‘drama queen.’

You are a traditionalist with most aspects of your life. You like your Halloween costume to be basic, well made, and conventional enough to wear another year. (I would like my costume well made (I can sew) and would like to come up with something that I’d be willing to wear for more than one year. I think, given the family history interest that I have, that it would be fun to come up with a famous or semi-famous local person, and portray them.

However, all the famous, or infamous people that we hear about from here were associated with Caldwell, Kansas, the cowtown south and west of here, and I would have to be a cowboy, dance hall girl, or ‘lady of the evening. Maybe a cowgirl, I can twirl a rope, and still have my boots from my riding days…

I love this old photograph of my parents, my mom Dorothy Stocking on the left, & dad Harold Stocking on the right, with my mom’s Aunt May (Breneman) Jones Willey, and Mom’s parents, Carrie (Breneman) and Warner Jones sandwiched between them.

After attending the KCGS Conference with Maureen Taylor, I find myself looking for clues in my photographs.

First, the photograph had to be taken before November 1st, 1947, because Grandpa Jones passed away on that date. (I could look up the car makes, models and years, too!)

Second, either they had been somewhere, or were getting ready to go, because Dad is wearing his ‘good’ overalls. In other words, he and Grandpa had on new and clean overalls. (As opposed to faded by the sun, ‘everyday’ overalls that Dad worked the fields and fed and milked the cows in!)

It wouldn’t have been church or a funeral, because the men would have worn suits for that, so maybe they went to town shopping for the day, to visit someone in the hospital, or to visit family or friends in another town.

And it’s in the colder months, as the women all have on heavy wool coats, and scarves to keep their ears warm, and maybe just to ‘tie their hair down’ to keep it from blowing in the Kansas wind.

And now I need to ask my mom, to see if she remembers the occasion that prompted the photograph sixty-plus years ago!

Randy Seaver of GeneaMusings issued this challenge on Saturday night! I’m a bit late, but I don’t want to miss out on all the fun, so here goes!

Hey geneaphiles – it’s Saturday Night, time for more Genealogy Fun for all Genea-Musing readers.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and we need more of you to do this, otherwise it may end…), is to:

1) Read Brenda Joyce Jerome’s post Who or What Do You Blame? on the Western Kentucky Genealogy blog. She asks these questions:

* Can you identify person or event that started you on this search for family information?

* Did you pick up researching where a relative had left off?

* Did your interest stem from your child’s school project on genealogy?

* If you have been researching many years, it may be hard to pinpoint one reason for this journey.

2) Write your responses on your own blog, in a comment to this blog post, or in a note or comment on Facebook.

Maybe I was always a little interested in family history, but after Hobart Stocking, a professor from Oklahoma researched, wrote, and published the Stocking Ancestry, I became more interested, and shared the information with my husband’s family. And that’s when my father-in-law, Melvin Kline, stated that he wished someone would research their family tree.

And He Kind of Hoped They Wouldn’t, Too…

And, he said, he kind of hoped maybe they wouldn’t, too. He said that he was afraid of “what we might find.”

The story that he had always heard went like this, “three brothers came west, fought along the way, and never corresponded again.”

And because there wasn’t any correspondence between Pop’s family, and his grandfather’s family, at least that he knew of, he believed the story to be true, and he was afraid that we’d find out that his grandfather might have been the the person who caused the problem.

But still, he really wanted to know.

Who could possibly resist a puzzle or a challenge like this?

Not me, for sure, so I took up the quest and along the way became ‘hooked’ on genealogy and preserving family history.

I was woefully ignorant of how to get started, so it was quite a long time before I learned about at least one ‘family feud’, learned where the family had migrated to Kansas from, and ‘met up’ with some distant cousins.

Unfortunately, by that time, my father-in-law had passed on, and I really wish he were here so that I could say “Thank you” to him for starting me on such a fun and addictive hobby/pastime/obsession.